Day of Remembrance of the Genocide of the Jewish People during World War II
Description:
For the first time, the "crystal night" - the night of broken windows - was organized by the Nazis in Germany on November 4, 1938. In the wave of Jewish pogroms that swept the country, 100 Jews were killed, all synagogues in Germany were destroyed, more than 7,000 Jewish shops were looted. More than 30,000 Jews were thrown into concentration camps.
On this day, the “security team”, dousing, pre-cooked bakla and the walls of the synagogue with gasoline, set the building on fire in cold blood. The main synagogue of Latvia, the Great Choral Synagogue, was destroyed along with the believers there. There were 500 people...
The action was carried out by a team led by Victor Arais. The so-called “security team” was organized with the arrival of the Nazis in Riga on July 1, 1941. Volunteers were enrolled in it, mainly high school students and students of the University of Latvia. Viktor Arais is a 31-year-old young and handsome intellectual who received a Soviet law degree a year ago. But nothing goes away with impunity. On July 10, 1975, 34 years after the crimes were committed, German authorities tracked down Victor Arais, who was working at the time as a typewriter in a printing house in Frankfurt am Main. The number of those killed by this “ploughman” (the surname Arais is translated from the Latvian language as “ploughman”) and his henchmen was estimated at hundreds of thousands, but at the trial he only regretted that it was not possible to shoot all, that there were living witnesses. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, and on his birthday, January 13, 1988, at the age of 78, former executioner Victor Arais died peacefully in Kassau prison.